The present invention relates to systems for photographically reproducing both line and continuous tone graphic material and more particularly to a dual resolution method and apparatus for reproducing such materials.
The newspaper industry has seen in the last few years considerably activity directed toward reducing or eliminating many of the manual operators required in the production of plate-ready negatives. Photo-typesetters now provide hyphenated and justified line copy for the pasteup room directly from a keyboard terminal. In the pasteup room the line copy is combined manually with other line graphic materials e.g. artwork and with continuous tone graphic materials in a "pasteup" of the newspaper page. After the desired page composition has been achieved, the pasteup page is photographed to obtain a plate-ready negative.
The page makeup operation using manual pasteup techniques is time consuming, inefficient and labor intensive. Recent efforts have focused on electronic systems for composing newspaper pages. An automatic page composition system that is capable of merging both line and continuous tone copy in the production of plate-ready negatives has been described in the trade literature. See Inland Printer/American Lithographic, July 1975, Pages 40I-40K.
This system, called "Pagitron" by Optronics International, Inc., utilizes a scanner/plotter for the input/output functions with intermediate computer processing and storage of the scanned line and continuous tone copy. The copy, which can be scanned in randomly, is converted into digital form for computer processing and storage. Page makeup is performed by calling up selected blocks of copy on a visual display for editing, positioning, enlarging or reducing etc. After the page makeup has been completed, the digital signals representing the final page configuration are stored for subsequent use or are inputted to the plotter portion of the scanned/plotter for controlling the exposure of a plate-ready negative. Alternatively, the digital signals can be employed to control a laser plate maker.
Since the system utilizes digital processing and storage of all types of scanned graphics including, type, line artwork and continuous tone photographs, the data handling requirements are considerable when all of the various types of graphic material are processed and stored as high resolution bit images. However, it is not necessary to treat each type of graphic material in the same manner. If the line graphic material and the continuous tone graphic material are treated as high and low resolution data, respectively, significant data compression can be achieved with a concomitant reduction in data handling capacity and system expense.
It is accordingly a general object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for dual resolution photographic reproduction of line and continuous tone graphic material.
It is a specific object of the invention to provide a photographic reproduction method and apparatus in which line graphic material is processed at a high resolution while continuous tone graphic material is processed at a low resolution.
It is still another object of the invention to provide a method and apparatus for photographically producing half-tone reproductions of continuous tone originals at a low resolution and reproduction of line graphic originals at a high resolution.
It is a feature of the invention that both half-tone and continuous tone reproductions can be produced from continuous tone graphic originals at a low resolution.
It is still another feature of the invention that both line and continuous tone graphic materials can be scanned by the same instrumentality.
It is a further feature of the invention that both line and continuous tone graphic materials can be photoplotted by the same instrumentality.